The Bulwark: Take Away Trump

The Bulwark: Profiting from Never Trump Media (full series)
Birth of The Bulwark | From Nonprofit to Profits
Making a Business of Trump Derangement | Take Away Trump

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Take Away Trump and You Take Their God

Real people who walk among us are supposedly paying $100 annually for access to this sort of thing. Most of the people who produce professional content regarding public policy or politics don’t have an audience that will endure these wild speculations once, let alone over…and over…and over again.

The current financial success and growth notwithstanding, many of The Bulwark’s content creators have a serious career challenge to navigate. Even if Trump were a horrifying hybrid of Hitler and Stalin, with the body count to match (and he obviously is not), then the sharpest criticisms of him from any one person—no matter how talented—would be the first ones produced, certainly not the last one.

Obsessions are difficult to maintain over time. The creators who take on this challenge are filling up their résumés with less and less quality each time they go back to the same well. After the same person has written their “Orange Man Bad” essay for the 65th time in 10 months, the message is going to degrade and only a sufferer of Trump Derangement Syndrome is going to keep reading or listening.

At the moment, The Bulwark has obviously found a way to turn those gluttons for punishment into paying customers. But some of The Bulwark’s staff might want to work somewhere else one day.

Think of a 20-something journalist with a conventional portfolio of diverse and real news assignments who moves over to The Bulwark. How marketable do they become if their résumé becomes loaded up with one-dimensional, piteously repetitive work that appeared alongside goofy speculations about extra-constitutional presidential terms?

It’s also plausible that Bulwark’s subscribers might someday tire of Trump tirades. Ask the MSNBC staff how that can happen. Theoretically, The Bulwark should be vulnerable to the old joke about how fast bankruptcy can occur: slowly, and then all at once.

But for now, despite the colorless confirmation bias that serves nobody outside the anti-Trump orbit, The Bulwark is undeniably a commercial success.

That’s no small accomplishment. Political movement journals are almost never profitable. The aforementioned Ramparts never was. In 2005, National Review founder William F. Buckley estimated his publication had lost a cumulative total of $25 million throughout its history.

Losing Trump, whenever that happens, may present an existential threat to The Bulwark’s bottom line. So, in addition to stoking paranoia for fun and profit, some wishful thinking might also be fueling JVL’s nutty “third term” speculation.

Unlike Vice President Mike Pence, who seemed to endure rather than enjoy the understudy role, J.D. Vance was selected as a clear heir to the MAGA movement’s crown. And so far, it looks like he’s really enjoying it. If everything works out as planned for him, then President Vance would leave the White House after his second term on January 20, 2037.

That day will be 18 years after the founding of The Bulwark. If Trump Derangement Syndrome can be sustained for that long, then just imagine how many Substack subscribers would by then be paying Sarah Longwell and her team to keep them “sane.”

MAGA doesn’t need The Bulwark. But that formulation doesn’t work in reverse. To survive, The Bulwark needs the very thing they want to destroy.

In a scene from the 1976 remake of King Kong, the giant ape is trapped inside an oil supertanker and taken from his home. Two of the main characters—played by Charles Grodin and Jeff Bridges—discuss what this means for the natives left behind:

Fred Wilson (Grodin): And before you cry a lot, you should ask the natives on that island what they thought of losing Kong.

Jack Prescott (Bridges): Actually, they’ll miss him a lot.

Fred Wilson: Like leprosy.

Jack Prescott: No, you’re dead wrong. He was the terror, the mystery of their lives, and the magic. A year from now that will be an island full of burnt-out drunks. When we took Kong, we kidnapped their god.

The Bulwark team will never admit it, and they may not even realize it, but Donald J. Trump has been their god. They owe him for everything they have accomplished.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-bulwark-part-4/